The nautical nonsense of art vs. entertainment
‘SpongeBob’ musical shows folly of predicting formula for success
If there were a perfect algorithm for creating a hit musical, it might churn out a phenomenon like “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical.”
Nickelodeon’s foray into Broadway, which premiered in December in New York, is based on broadly known source material, features a hodgepodge of celebrity composers, bears merchandising potential and screams “family outing.”
It sounds like a theme-park ride — an entertainment vehicle carrying a kid-friendly brand whose thrills promise to be easy, consumerist and most likely not life-changing.
Just look at the technical elements put in place at the Palace Theatre:
• A Foley setup aims to create Hollywood-mimicking special effects.
• An audience-interaction comedy bit involves a pirate wanting to sneak into the show (and yes, he makes nautical puns).
• Confetti and balloons drop onto the orchestra seats in a light-filled showcase more likely seen at the Day for Night music festival than at the Hobby Center.
• And guess who composed the music? Aerosmith, John Legend, Cyndi Lauper, Sara Bareilles, Panic! At the Disco and so on.
Whether this all serves the theory that “SpongeBob” should be destined for failure or success, however, depends on how you define success within the “art versus entertainment” spectrum.
The art-versus-entertainment idea is one the most tired dichotomies in history, a concept of a mythical hierarchy with dubious practical application. Yet the idea rears its head in various forms to this day.
Musical theater is particularly vulnerable to the stereotyping that fuels this mind-set. A production appears to stake its claim in one part of the art/ entertainment spectrum the moment it’s programmed into existence, before sets are built or actors cast. In other words, you don’t need to see “SpongeBob” to believe it’s already terrible art, or perfect entertainment. The show is like “Escape to Margaritaville,” the just-landed-on-Broadway Jimmy Buffet musical that surfed by Houston in the fall.
The title says it all.
Musical confusion
The regional market has a well-oiled machine for titles saying it all — the season announcement.
These announcements are a compendium of choices that, like a fashion line or multicourse meal, make a broader statement — the equivalent to sticking a flag in the dirt of the “art versus entertainment” spectrum.
Some organizations quite baldly show their split personality, dividing the season between what they believe is “necessary art” and what they believe will sell. Stages Repertory Theatre produces musicals such as “The Great American Trailer Park Musical” and balances them with serious plays about heroin abuse, racism and depression. The Alley Theatre fills its summers with murder mysteries and winters with “The Christmas Carol” while the fall and spring sometimes feature disturbing titles such as “The Nether,” which involves scenes of violence and sex against a minor.
Musical theater, which today remains a confusing, ogrelike mash-up of high culture and pop sensibility, struggles to embody such a dichotomy. On Jan. 18, Theatre Under The Stars, Houston’s largest musical theater company, released a 50th anniversary season that further complicates musical theater’s place in the performingarts culture. Its selections for 2018-19 are: “Oklahoma!,” “The Wiz,” “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” “Mamma Mia!,” “Ragtime” and a yet unannounced show.
TUTS has released largely revisionist and experimental seasons the past three years. The productions themselves aren’t experimental. Their existence is.
In 2016, incoming artistic director Sheldon Epps scrapped half the TUTS season in favor of productions such as “In the Heights” that were more modern and, as Epps hinted at, less white. But there, again, is the personal litmus test of the art/entertainment dichotomy, the question of whether diversity’s merit is commercial or moral. When you chose an early Lin-Manuel Miranda work over “Grease,” are you choosing commerce or art?
The current TUTS season took a different turn. It featured a pre-Broadway tryout, a new, pop-infused holiday British panto and, this upcoming June, will see a Latino-cast “Guys and Dolls.” But unlike this year’s season, next year is devoid of new work on the main stage (the announcement mentions new works and community projects outside the main season), favoring instead titles you might consider “blue chip.” In three years, TUTS has revealed three different types of aspirational thinking.
TUTS’ aspiration for 2018-19 is what “SpongeBob” provides.
Well, not literally. Perhaps not even metaphorically. On the surface, “Oklahoma!” and “SpongeBob” are polar opposites. “Oklahoma!” sells itself on familiarity and classic status. “SpongeBob,” littered with topical jokes on climate change and immigration, sells itself on novelty and pop-cultural relevance.
But Broadway shows want to be the next “Hamilton.” “SpongeBob” is up against “Cats,” “The Lion King” and “Dear Evan Hansen.” Nonprofit musical theater need not compete for tourist dollars. “Oklahoma!” competes with itself — or rather, with the cycle of expectation and delivery of the pre-planned season.
So “Oklahoma!,” along with the rest of the new TUTS season, is a Houston version of algorithm-driven entertainment. Don’t scoff at the formula, though. TUTS’ 2018-19 season, while seeming neither bold nor contemporary, belies a bigger statement very much about the now: TUTS is bringing the big guns. It wants to solidify its monopoly on big-production musical theater for the future.
But here’s the problem. To even assume that TUTS believes “Oklahoma!,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Ragtime” will sell more consistently than, say, “In the Heights” and “The Secret Garden” is to believe that algorithmic thinking is a tenet in musical theater.
Forget algorithms
Algorithms rarely fare well on Broadway, an industry in which the vast majority of new shows lose money and where both “Cats,” a plotless production about animals singing the words of T.S. Eliot, and “Hamilton,” a historical retelling of the Founding Fathers, are behemoths. Meanwhile, musicals based on “Shrek,” Spider-Man and Dr. Seuss flopped.
In the regional market, particularly in the performing arts, algorithms are everywhere. “The Christmas Carol,” “The Nutcracker” and Beethoven’s Fifth are all predictably easy to sell. But that kind of thinking can easily turn into purism. Believing that some shows are inherently better or more profitable is to believe that taste is static. It’s to believe not in tradition but in stereotypes.
Speaking of stereotypes: The way I’ve described “SpongeBob” so far has been both flawed and misleading. The big twist in the show is that it’s very good. A critical darling thus far, “SpongeBob” is too human, experimental, political and psychedelic to be compared to a branded theme-park ride.
Take this scene: A magical realist dream sequence turns the musical briefly into a Marvin Hamlisch-inspired number about depression, all happening inside Squidward’s mind. SpongeBob’s musically inclined neighbor and coworker, surrounded by pink-sequined chorus boys and girls, does a tap dance in tribute to his dead mother.
“I’m not a loser!” he sings, thrusting a top hat into the air. This glitzily triumphant queer fantasy, supposedly taking place in the mere seconds after a rock band insults this eight-legged sourpuss, is both utterly unnecessary and the best part of the show. No algorithm could have achieved this.
Which is another way to say that, though “SpongeBob” could have been vapid and unoriginal but isn’t, TUTS’ new season appears, stereotypically, to be a step backward but doesn’t have to be. And the point about money holds true as well. “SpongeBob” could have easily flopped, and so can TUTS’ classics-oriented lineup next year. The formula is never sacred.
Viewed another way, TUTS’ predictable list of shows next year couldn’t have been predicted. By choosing a canon-based season, it once again changes its identity. And TUTS, by picking productions that people supposedly know and love, has become the most experimental theater company in Houston.